Saturday, January 26, 2013

xg - BOOM!

Well, things are exploding, in a good, intentionally-when-I-press-the-BOOM!-button way.

It doesn't look like much on the screen shot, but that orange circle is the explosion from one of the 'driver' charges, and the white dot to the right of it is the ball, which is moving from the kick the explosion gave it. It took a while to tweak the numbers so the ball speed decays appropriately on bounces, and I stuck some data in ball movement that won't be used until later features. I definitely had to stretch my brain a bit to figure out the various vector math, but I think it's OK at this point (the physics definitely falls in the emulated rather than simulated realm).

Once it was working, I lost some time to moving the ball around with explosions :) It's certainly possibly to queue up several charges with time delays to give the ball multiple kicks in a single detonator press (i.e. 'stroke'), but it turns out that it's actually pretty difficult to guess times and distances off the cuff - this game has a lot of room for skill development.

With this done I can definitely get a playable, though limited, game working by the end of the game jam. I'm around step 30 on my dev plan (with a bit of bouncing around the order), and the minimal game emerges around step 35. Once I'm at that point I'll have to decide between implementing more game mechanics or adding prettier assets (images, sounds, a help/directions screen,...minor things like that...). Which way I go will depend on what kind of mood I'm in when I get there, but I give it 2:1 odds that I'll end up working on the mechanics - I expect the kind of assets I can create and use/implement in an hour or two won't greatly improve the play experience.